”..Ana Flores guides us carefully through her memories and imagination in this show. She goes so far as to post entries from the journal she kept on the three-week trip to her homeland that she took two years ago, returning for the first time after 40 years.

The seven sections of wall text have been blown up large, to visually hold their own with the art. They are lucid, narrative, and give us a sense of being there physically, as Flores’s art does viscerally. Her descriptions are vivid: "A young woman, like a priestess in a Greek temple, silently ushers us in. An eternal flame burns on a platform on the floor and bronze reliefs of Che and his comrades who died during the Santa Clara assault on Batista’s armored train are set into granite block walls." The constant presence of Castro on television reminds her of a TV cartoon character from her childhood, Foghorn Leghorn, who "was always lecturing and cajoling the hens in the coop."

Several colorful roosters peck at the gray gallery floor and strut in a couple of paintings, but the most dominating figure in the show is Castro. A ceiling-high puppet of him has arms outstretched, ready for an amiable abrazo, the cigar between two fingers actually a missile. The puppet theater he stands behind has little figures basking and running, playing a conga drum, fishing, making out. As elsewhere in the gallery, hand-written text is crayoned above the figures, explaining that this is the malecon, Havana’s oceanfront promenade.”

Human Touch
Ana Flores shares her Cuba Journal
by Bill Rodriguez
Providence Phoenix, 7/2/2004